Clean coal - quotable quotes

Clean coal - quotable quotes includes statements referring to Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).

Quotes
Some of the statements skeptical of CCS by industry insiders or those close to the power generation or coal industry include:


 * "CCS as a magical technology that solves the carbon problem for coal plants is oversold. … I think there is a lot to learn, and it is going to take us a lot longer for us to figure it out than a lot of us think." - Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy in June 2008.


 * "There are going to be some coal plants built in the next decade. I don’t think very many around the country. The environmental characteristics obviously are the main stoppers. Clean coal technology, carbon capture and sequestration is certainly being worked on, but I think people will, if they’re candid, tell you there hasn’t been much progress on that for some time. There will be a handful of demonstration projects and the capture of the carbon coming from coal over the next decade but the technology’s not going to be commercially available in large volumes in this decade and the sequestration problem—the volume of CO2 that has to be sequestered—is just enormous. Things like enhanced oil recovery don’t even start to cut into the volume of sequestration that’s needed. So clean coal is not going to provide tens of thousands of megawatts, in my opinion, over the next decade." Roger Duncan, recently retired general manager of Austin Energy, from his speech at Power Gen's renewable energy conference February. 23, 2010. (It was one of his last speeches as GM.)


 * "Clean coal has become an invitation for ridicule" - an Australian government adviser in 2009.


 * "The reality is, you are not going to see another coal fired power station built in Australia. That's, that's a simple fact. You can talk about all the stuff you like about carbon capture storage, that concept will not materialise for 20 years, and probably never." - Ian MacFarlane, the Shadow Minister for Energy and Resources and the Acting Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader on Emissions Trading Design for the Liberal Party of Australia. As Minister for Industry Tourism and Resources in the government led by John Howard, Macfarlane promoted carbon capture and storage.


 * "The Government's incentive is just that. It is an aim to bring forward the introduction of this technology into commercial plants as soon as possible ... Well, what happened was nothing happened and that is really the problem for Australia. The clean coal option has passed us by. Twenty years to wait before the technology is available. Thirty years before it is commercial. We will need to move on to other options by then." - Ian Macfarlane, November 10, 2009.


 * In a presentation in May 2010 John W. Rowe, the Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of the energy company, Exelon Corporation, outlined that a review of carbon cost abatement options for the company in 2010 revealed that "a proposed clean coal project we have seen in the market is now the most expensive option, requiring $500 per tonne of CO2 to be economic."


 * '"One of the plants we are building is CCS ready, although to be quite frank, no one really knows what that is at the moment," said Steve Lennon, managing director of South Africa's government owned electricity utility, Eskom.


 * the Australian government's climate change adviser Ross Garnaut wrote in his draft report that "the future of the Australian coal industry depends critically on the success of carbon capture and storage not only in Australia, but in the rest of the world, and especially in Australia’s major coal markets in Asia."


 * "[T]he notion of coal as the solution to America’s energy problems is a technological fantasy on par with the dream of a manned mission to Mars." - Jeff Goodell, author of Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future, Houghton Mifflin, April 2007.


 * CCS "does not work as well as planting more trees or reducing desertification, " Zhang Guobao, the Director of the National Energy Administration and Vice-Minister of the State Development and Reform Commission in China, told a conference.


 * "‘Clean coal’ is not just a pipe-dream. The technology solutions that the combined expertise of AAplc and Shell will be proving in developing the Monash Energy Project will help keep coal in the global energy mix for many years, with the longterm goal of zero emissions." In 2009, with none of the plans yet coming into fruition, a company source was quoted in The Age as saying the project is "not commercially viable".


 * In a media release announcing the suspension of the proposed Pee Dee Generating Facility, Santee Cooper specifically singled out the potential cost of retrofitting Carbon Capture and Storage to the proposed plant. "The bill calls for carbon capture and sequestration technology to be placed on new plants by 2025, and there currently exists no technology to do that. The cost of the technology and the carbon tax are unknown and expected to be high, and this uncertainty causes great concern for Santee Cooper in considering future coal plants," Santee Cooper president and CEO Lonnie Carter stated.

Related SourceWatch articles

 * Clean coal
 * Carbon Capture and Storage